What a small pocket.If SAA continues with this rate the pocket will fall before Christmas.

Hanny Benny

Let from the alzinki whoresons no one survive!!! This children-beheaders have to be eliminated one for one!!!

Gary Sellars

No mercy for the foat-guckers… kill every last one of these stinking vermin.

Pavel Pavlovich

And spare as many goats as possible.

LeseMajeste

My thoughts and prayers are with the brave Syrian people, their army and friends that are the only real freedom fighters on Earth, along with the Russians. My nation, the USA, is a corrupt, murderous, Israeli ass-kissing governmnet that only lives to serve Israel.

I pray you remove the snakes before our next president takes office!!!

chris chuba

Would anyone be able to identify the groups in the pocket identified by their flags? Starting at the northern most point, I recognize that as Al Nusra 2.0 and I see a total of 5 different flags. I do recognize the FSA flag as well. If anyone responds, You can go clockwise or counter-clockwise. Thanks in advance.

Good work Travis. Yes, except that at 8 o’clock I identify Fustaqim Kamu Umrit Union then next at 10 o’clock another Fustaqim which I can’t read. Note that the FSA claims at least 12 separate brigades/divisions under command plus another ten allied groups all of which have fancy logos and give themselves grand titles of corps/legions/divisions/brigades/battalions etc..!! None of these ragtag gangs correspond to real military formed units , they are just “sham ” to impress their foreign backers, they disappear and change their logos more often than their underpants. So now they are supposedly united in Ops Room (Ghurfat Amaliyah) Fateh Halab re-named from Ghurfat Amaliyah al-Askar Halab al Hur – Freed Aleppo Military Operations Room, new name same bunch of jihadist dogs of war.

Travis Huynh

Yes you’re right that’s the Fastaqim Kama Umert

Boris Kazlov

Please no more listening to horse-face Kerry. SAA advance should not be stopped by any means.

Piet Saman

If the rebels/jihadists keep retreating towards the last remaining suburbs the consentration of fighters will be bigger and bigger depending on their losses ofcourse. At a point there is no more retraining and they will have to make their last stand or surrender. The last suburbs will be the hardest to take because they will spread out and SAA will have to go house by house to clear all rebels out. Airstrikes wont help that much is that close quarter battles.

dutchnational

The SAA better take it slowly by consolidating their advances.

I really do not understand the tactics of the rebels. Kobane showed that an underequipped but determined force can hold out against overwhelming odds.

Sure, the USAF supported the kurds in their defense but the rebels have heavy arms, which the YPG in Kobane did not.

YPG tactics were to defend during the day and counterattack in close quarters during the night, robbing IS of their advantages. Rebels could do this too.

Instead, they shell kurds who are not attacking them.

Joseph Scott

Well, while religions typically aren’t rational, Wahhabism is an especially irrational flavour. and culture is reflected in military performance and tactics. In general, the more a religion emphasises fatalism, absolute submission to a higher authority, the need to crush dissension with brute force and the irrelevance and sinful, worthless nature of the human being, the less rational the tactics and the lower the overall military performance. Look at the Saudis.

Of course, quite a lot of religions contain aspects of several or all of those, but the degree of prominence and emphasis they receive in each specific religious culture varies. For example, consider that historically, Protestant armies have tended to, on average, outperform Catholic armies by a significant margin. There are individual cases were other cultural and military organizational factors intervened, but in general, that has been true. (And for the record, I’m not Christian at all, so it’s not a matter of personal favouritism.) Protestant countries have also tended to have more efficient administrative organisations than Catholic ones. But, when you compare the differences in flavour, it becomes immediately obvious why: Catholicism places a greater emphasis on fatalism, on the human as a a hopelessly flawed individual, who can only be redeemed by Jesus’ grace, and not by any merit of their own. Protestantism, as summed up in Calvin’s “God helps those that help themselves;” has tended to posit that achieving heavenly status was a matter of merit, that good works and achievement in the mortal world did count for something. Catholicism gives you a free ride to be as ‘sinful’ and useless as you want, because as long as you confess and accept Jesus at the end, you’re good. Protestantism’s emphasis on merit in the material world encourages achievement.

You can see the same thing in Buddhism. In feudal Japan we see that those who subscribed to the esoteric Buddhist sects that emphasised achieving enlightenment through development of mental and spiritual faculties, such as Tendai and Shingon, produced better fighters, with better tactics, higher morale and more initiative than the mainstream Buddhist sects that taught that only many tedious lifetimes of social conformity would work. Sects like Zen (eventually the samurai favourite) which emphasised psychological development, but less rigorously than the total development of Tendai and Shingon, and tended to greater overall fatalism than those two, and Nicherin, which emphasised devotional chanting and active participation in the religious community, occupied a middle rung between the two extremes. Thus, we see the Taira, who followed court Buddhism, performed poorly in the Genpei War against the Minamoto, who were either ambiguous about religion, or who had been raised in monasteries which followed the more esoteric Tendai/Shingon Yamabushi sects. The Minamoto came to adopt Zen as a more Bushido-oriented sect when they achieved power, and also declined some in overall military ability compared to their Genpei War performance. The Ashikaga who displaced them also adopted Zen. The Ikko-Ikki who fought so ferociously against the whole feudal system were an offshoot of Nicherin. The sohei who dominated central Japan until their temples were raised by the pragmatist Oda Nobunaga, and are often regarded as feudal Japan’s foremost warriors, were of the Tendai sect. Ninja were also followers of Tendai and Shingon (and in fact were socially interchangeable with the sohei of those sects, with some living as both), and on those occasions were they chose to deploy on the battlefield, proved considerably superior to run-of-the-mill samurai as warriors (Contrary to the weak but clever assassin stereotype that gaming culture and samurai propaganda has presented.)